Dealing with Disparate Goals

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Dealing with Disparate Goals

Grant Fritchey

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July 7, 2018 at 5:10 pm

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Comments posted to this topic are about the item Dealing with Disparate Goals
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RonKyle SSC-Dedicated Points: 31537 More actions · Answer 1

Some of those issues reflect inertia and misplaced trust. Both Truman and the UN wanted to reunite Korea per pre-war UN declarations. But only if the Chinese wouldn't intervene. Given MacArthur's renewed prestige due to the success of the Inchon Landings, which no one but him thought would work, his assessment that the Chinese wouldn't intervene wasn't questioned. He would deny that he could have made such an assessment in testimony before the Congressional committee investigating the conduct of the war. But as I said in a paper I presented many years ago, MacArthur was all too eager to play the expert on the Oriental mind.

Knut Boehnert SSCrazy Points: 2951 More actions · Answer 2

As long as IT seems and is held to be a different part than the business any communication must fail.
IT must be part of the business and aligned to the business goals or it will be a drag to the business.

As for history:
Probably a good part of why the Third Reich never lasted 1000 years was the misalignment of goals between Hitler and Halder.
Also a very neat display of how business goals can be re-interpreted (by Halder) to the point of becoming something else.
And the good thing was: The operational goals were drawn up well before the operation started. Talk project scope creep and misdirection at high level before the project even gets underway.

Jeff Moden SSC Guru Points: 1003853 More actions · Answer 3

My experience has been that it all comes down to proper bi-directional communications. By "proper", I mean that management drops the "I'm the boss... do it my way" attitude and actually listens to the people they hired to help them. In one job, one boss had to have something stood up "RIGHT NOW" and heard that MySQL might be the way to go. They then insisted on it. We had one person with some minor MySQL experience and they took it to the wall and that was also a part of the reason why management didn't discuss it with the rest of us because they knew that we'd recommend against it.

That person that knew a little about MySQL left the company. And, the app sucked (as did the underlying DB) with no one to fix it because they wanted it so bad, that's the way they got it. 😉

The good part about it is the fact they we didn't even need to give management the "opportunity to fail" (not to be confused with setting them up for failure, which we did not... we didn't even know about the project). Such failures can actually be quite good because, the next time they suggest such a silly thing, maybe they'll seek out the advice of the people that are hell bent to make them look good.

--Jeff Moden

RBAR is pronounced "ree-bar" and is a "Modenism" for Row-By-Agonizing-Row.
First step towards the paradigm shift of writing Set Based code:
________Stop thinking about what you want to do to a ROW... think, instead, of what you want to do to a COLUMN.

Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.

Helpful Links:
How to post code problems
How to Post Performance Problems
Create a Tally Function (fnTally)

Eric M Russell SSC Guru Points: 125519 More actions · Answer 4

Knut Boehnert - Monday, July 9, 2018 5:02 AM
As long as IT seems and is held to be a different part than the business any communication must fail.
IT must be part of the business and aligned to the business goals or it will be a drag to the business.
As for history:
Probably a good part of why the Third Reich never lasted 1000 years was the misalignment of goals between Hitler and Halder.
Also a very neat display of how business goals can be re-interpreted (by Halder) to the point of becoming something else.
And the good thing was: The operational goals were drawn up well before the operation started. Talk project scope creep and misdirection at high level before the project even gets underway.

As if New Order of Europe and The Final Solution were public works projects that simply got way out of hand. :unsure:

"Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Instead, seek what they sought." - Matsuo Basho